Andrew Levison

Growing a Tech Enabled Photo Booth Business In the Heart of Atlanta

1. Howdy! What's your background, and what are you working on?

My name is Andrew Levison and the I'm the founder of Mag-nificent. Mag-nificent provides unique photo experiences for any event. We have an iOS and Android app that allow you to take photos at an event--a wedding, a professional sporting event, a corporate event--and instantly turn your photos into personalized magnets and other souvenirs you can take home with you as a memento from the experience.

2. What convinced you to get started with conversational marketing?

I was at the Photo Booth Expo in Las Vegas early this year. I was attending a fantastic presentation on current marketing tactics for our industry and one of the the recommendations was using chatbots to generate leads. I was blown away by the potential of the channel and so when I returned home one of the first things I did was look into setting up live chat and a chatbot for our site.

3. What went into building your initial bot?

We had to think through the different types of site visitors we have and make sure we provide a great chatbot experience for each of them. We have site visitors who are having an event and are interested in renting our photo or video booths. We have visitors who are interested in franchising our business. And we have visitors who attended one of our events and are looking to find photos taken at the event.

Once we understood the different type of site visitors we have, we mapped out the common conversation topics they like to have with us. Finally we had Harry and ConvoPanda design, build, and implement the result chatbot.

4. How have you engaged prospects and grown Mag-nificent?

In our business happy customers and great referrals are so key to our growth. It's not uncommon for us to be hired for a corporate or social event with 100+ attendees. Attendees love how easy and fun it is to create memorable photographs to take home as mementos. Therefore often they'll reach back out to us after the event to learn about hiring us for their own weddings, birthdays, or corporate parties.

What's great now, is with our new bot, we can engage with our happy customers and event attendees automatically. Whether it's 10 am in the morning or 10 pm at night. In the first month with our bot it helped us close a huge client for us that'll become a long-term relationship.

5. What's your sales funnel, and how have you grown your revenue?

Our main funnel is for people planning an event and looking for a photo booth or video booth experience. We have a number of products and services so we can provide a great experience no matter the event. With that being said, our sales are therefore consultative and educational. We ask a bit about the event and then hop on the phone to walk the person through a custom recommendations based on the type of event.

One big way we've grown revenues is by seeking longer-term corporate relationships. We have great partnerships with the Georgia Swarm, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Atlanta United all local sports franchises. These relationships are a great win for both Mag-nificent and the sports franchise.

6. What are your goals for the future?

Our biggest goal for the future is to expand our franchising opportunity across the continental United States. We have a great model that has worked extremely well in Atlanta. With our proprietary processes and lead generation techniques we want to make it easy for first-time or serial entrepreneurs across the country to serve their communities with top-notch photo booth and video booth experiences.

7. What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

I'd say the biggest challenge we've overcome (and to be honest, still overcoming), is making the transition from a single owner operated operation to something that could be replicated for franchisees. Systems that I had previously taken for granted now must be formalized and documented. Doing things yourself is easy. Creating systems that allow others to take your place is tough.

8. Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I look to be open to testing new promising channels and ways to connect with potential buyers. I like to focus on investments that can turn into valuable on-going marketing assets. That continue to generate a return in the business over a long time and don't take a lot of baby sitting and maintenance. If you can approach marketing with this mindset you'll be able to build and scale a business over the long run.

9. What's your advice for conversational marketers who are just starting out?

Recognize that bots take some iteration and tweaking to setup. You start with your best assumptions based on what you know about your site visitors and then you need to tweak them for a few weeks to really make the customer experience great. For example, at first many of our visitors were asking for help finding photos from an event they attended but we didn't automatically handle this question. After a week we added this new conversation topic. Now more than half of our conversations are on this subject and they are all handled automatically.

10. Where can we go to learn more?

We'd love to have you visit our website or connect with us on social media. Feel free to download our app to see how you could use Mag-nificent at your next event!